ESA/ATG/ESO/s. Brunier
Printing of ESA’s Gaia Space Observatory Artist, Maping the Stars of the Milky Way
When preparing to turn off his Gaia spacecraft, the European space agency came across unusual resistance.
ESA’s spacecraft, which in 2022 gave us a three -dimensional map highly detailed with the Milky Way and revealed to us, revealed surprisingly difficult to turn off.
“Turning off a spacecraft at the end of your mission seems a very simple task,” explains the Portuguese engineer Tiago Nogueiraoperator of, in the ESA. “But spaceships don’t really want to be turned off.”
According to, that is why the creators of Gaia to made it incredibly resistant to your hostile environment.
“Gaia was conceived for resist failures as radiation storms, Micrometeorites impacts or loss of communication with the land“Explained Nogueira.
“It has several redundant systems that guarantee that it can always restart and resume operations in case of disturbance“.
As a result, the team had to “conceive a dismantling strategy that involved dismantling and systematically disabled the redundancy layers”, since scientists They did not want to “reactivate in the future and began to transmit again if your solar panels found sunlight. ”
O Spatial Observatory was launched in 2013 To create the largest space catalog in history, but after more than a decade, it reached the age of predetermined reform earlier this month.
In a last activity, Gaia’s thrusters departed him from Lagrange 2, a point to about one million kilometers from Earth, where the gravitational force of the sun and earth combine to have the same orbital period of one year as our planet.
Instead, he entered a stable orbit of reform around the sun to ensure that he would never get closer to the earth for at least the next 100 years, according to ESA.
As part of their reform plan, scientists disabled their instruments and subsystems, one at a time. THE Team “corrupted deliberately” o software onboard to ensure that “it will never restart after we turn off the spacecraft,” he explained Julia Fortunespacecraft operations engineer.
Gaia helped astronomers to Create a huge map of the stars and even moons and exoplanetssome of which the agency expects to explore deeper with its next Plato mission.
O data treasure will allow scientists to have a better notion of solar system location on the gallatic disc. Previous observations of Gaia have revealed that the system is moving toward the gastic center at a rapid pace.
“I have mixed feelings between the enthusiasm for these important end -of -life operations and sadness to say goodbye to a spacecraft in which I worked for more than five years, ”he said fungly.“ I am very happy to have participated in this incredible mission“.
Teresa Oliveira Campos, Zap //
